Political Ramblings

Just 2 more weeks until the library's new network/website/catalog goes live... it's getting busier, but I still love it. Maybe addiction to change will get the better of me after all the excitement is over... but then, I'll be tweaking and adding things on the website for months after this.

Even more of "Go Mike Huckabee!" than the last post: He's won the last two events (FOX debate last night, American Family Council conference on Saturday) without anyone else even coming close. (Ok, so Mitt Romney paid people to vote for him, and Ron Paul once again assembled his army of cyber-spammers, but Huckabee wins in a fair debate. If only there ever were such a thing...) But, there have been more donations on his site today than there were in the last week. I can't wait for next week's poll numbers after all the attention has time to go produce effects there. Oh, and perhaps even more importantly: Chuck Norris supports Huckabee! Clearly, nobody should even consider any other candidate anymore.

I'm still reading "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming". This is an incredible book.

If we claim our concern lies with people dying from climate effects, as in the European heat wave in 2003, we have to ask ourselves why we are primarily thinking about implementing expensive CO2 cuts, which at best leave future communities warming slightly less quickly, still causing ever more heat deaths. Moreover, as warming will indeed prevent even more cold deaths, we have to ask why we are thinking about an expensive policy that will actually leave more people dead.

With Kyoto we can avoid about 140,000 malaria deaths over the century. At one-sixtieth the cost, we can tackle malaria directly and avoid eighty-five million deaths. For every time we save one person from malaria death through climate policies, the same money could have saved 36,000 people through better antimalaria policies. Which should be our first mission?

And, shockingly enough, Al Gore's logic is not flawless. He loves to say "If Greenland and a certain ice shelf in Antarctica slide off and melt in the ocean, water levels will rise by 40 feet." This is generally followed by horrible, awful, emotional pictures of the water levels in Florida and California. What he fails to recognize is that the Antarctic ice cap is at its highest volume of ice in recorded history. He also doesn't really support his theory either. Anyone can say "If all of Antarctica slides into the ocean, water levels will go up 400 feet." That doesn't make it a reality.

And, whaddya know, yet another political remark: We played with some numbers in my American Government class this morning and figured out that the average taxpayer would have to pay $20,000 every year for the government to break even, and that government spending has about doubled every decade for the last fifty years. Spooky.